1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing method and apparatus capable of searching image or text information including a designated search word.
2. Related Background Art
An apparatus capable of searching an image and creating a database using an input image recognized by an optical character reader (OCR) or the like is conventionally available.
In this apparatus for searching the image and creating the database, the step of causing a user to confirm a recognition result is conventionally prepared prior to registration in order to overcome search incompleteness caused by erroneous recognition in recognition processing using an OCR. In this confirmation step, candidate characters including characters up to the ones having lower similarities in the recognition results are presented to the user. The user selects a correct character, or inputs a correct character if no correct character is included in the candidate characters. A text to be registered by the user is thus manually corrected by the user, and the corrected text is then registered.
A technique for mechanically correcting a text using a word dictionary or knowledge database is available in place of causing the user to manually perform this correction operation.
In the prior art requiring the manual correction operation of the user, the user's load is heavy, and a cumbersome operation for a long period of time is required in each registration operation. This correction operation interferes with full-automatic correction.
In the technique for mechanically correcting the text using the word dictionary or knowledge database, practical applications for full-automatic correction cannot be realized without using a computer having a large computation capacity. In addition, reliability on automatic correction is still problematic.
When erroneous correction is made in the correction step of limiting a recognition result corresponding to one input character image to one character, the corrected character cannot be restored to the input character image.